Artist: John Fullbright
Album: Songs
Bitrate: 211kbps avg
Quality: EAC Secure Mode / LAME 3.98.4 / -V0 / 44.100Khz
Label: Thirty Tigers
Genre: Country
Size: 77.38 megs
PlayTime: 0h 48min 54sec total
Rip Date: 2014-05-30
Store Date: 2014-05-27
Track List:
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01. Happy 2:51
02. When You're Here 3:42
03. Keeping Hope Alive 3:02
04. She Knows 3:26
05. Until You Were Gone 2:31
06. Write A Song 4:32
07. Never Cry Again 4:14
08. Going Home 3:37
09. All That You Know 6:32
10. The That Lives Too Far 4:08
11. High Road 7:37
12. Very First Time 2:42
Release Notes:
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John Fullbright is a songwriter. Yeah, a lot of folks write songs, and some of
those songs are pretty good, and some of them are big hits, and then some of
them go nowhere at all commercially, but are still good songs, maybe just
waiting for the right person to sing them. But not everyone is a songwriter,
even if they write good songs now and then, at least not the way Fullbright is a
songwriter. He's in the Townes Van Zandt, Merle Haggard, Randy Newman, Jimmy
Webb mold when it comes to songwriting. It's what he does, and while he's a fine
singer, guitarist, pianist, and, as it turns out, whistler, it's his songs that
shine through with clarity, care, and thoughtfulness, each one a fully realized
little gem, and it's no coincidence that his second studio album is simply
called Songs. They're the stars here. Recorded with a sparse, open warmth, the
album opens with a Neil Young-like "Out on the Weekend" shuffle called "Happy"
(which even includes some pretty good plain old whistling from Fullbright) and
gracefully builds from there, an intimate, sometimes confessional batch of songs
that muse on life, love, and happiness with an easy familiarity, yet with an
unexpected turn of phrase here or there that lifts them into something singular
and special. "She Knows" is a brilliant love song, for instance, and when
Fullbright sings the hook, "She knows a thing or two about me," his verses have
already proven that, and the song is revealed as a song about what Fullbright
has learned about himself from her. Similarly, "Until You Were Gone" builds like
a familiar I-didn't-know-what-I-had-until-it-was-gone song, but in Fullbright's
hands, the realization feels actually lived in, absorbed, and learned.
Fullbright has been labeled a whole lot of things already, from country to
Americana, but what shines through most in this quiet, unassuming, but
wonderfully precise and intimately comforting set is that, while his songs may
individually fall into any of these genres, he is first and foremost a
songwriter. Thankfully, that is what he does, and he does it as well as anyone
in recent memory.